Genocide Book Removed from Toronto Curriculum
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Joan Oleck -- School Library Journal, 5/28/2008 2:00:00 PM
The Toronto District School Board recently withdrew author and lecturer Barbara Coloroso's Extraordinary Evil: A Brief History of Genocide (Penguin, 2007) from a high school curriculum after it was deemed inappropriate.
The book, which details genocide in places such as Armenia, Rwanda, and Nazi Germany, had been slated to be part of next fall’s high school history curriculum.
Complaints by Toronto's Turkish-Canadian community are the reason for the withdrawal. Specifically the community is upset at the book’s description of the Ottoman Empire's killings of Armenians in 1915–1916 as "genocide." The United Nations, 22 countries, and 53 Nobel Prize laureates have all used the word—which means the deliberate and systematic destruction of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group—to describe this widespread killing of Armenians.
The word "genocide" incites angry opposition among many Turks, who describe the Armenian deaths as World War I casualties. "Our schools and curricula cannot and should not be used for one-sided propaganda. History must be taught objectively with accurate account of essential historical facts," says a statement on the Council of Turkish Canadians Web site.
The council says that children of Turkish descent are already facing bullying, hate, and racism in the school yards, so “making one lobby group’s agenda the official curriculum of our schools will only increase the feeling of “vindication of the bullies.” The Toronto-based council had gathered nearly 11,000 signatures online worldwide, calling for changes to the curriculum.
Aris Babikian, executive director of the Armenian National Committee of Canada, says Armenian-Canadians saw the original curriculum with Coloroso's book as headed "in the right direction."
Coloroso, an American who formerly worked in Canada, explains that scholars from various universities developed the high school genocide course and chose her book on their own. "They accepted it," she says, "because they felt that, looking at bullying in the schoolyard and at hate crimes—that looking at genocide in that context—would be very good for students." Coloroso added that she was upset that works by "deniers" of the Ottoman genocide had been substituted for her book in the curriculum.
